Gilded Age
The period in the United States from around 1877 to 1895 was one in which American society underwent enormous change. New social and economic processes such as changing political parties, questioning citizenship, and formations of labor unions disrupted older ways of organizing American society, challenged traditional ways of thinking about what it meant to be an American, and led Americans to look for ways to cope with these changes. The Gilded Age proved to be an era which America appeared great on the outside, when in reality the country was internally struggling to deal adapt to the many changes economically and socially. This paper will discuss the ways in which changes disrupted traditional American ideas and structures and how Americans clashed over coping with this massive change by looking at Robert Cherny's American Politics in the Gilded Age, "The River Ran Red" and the fourteenth amendment.Cherny discussed many of the changes that occurred during 1877-1895 in his book American Politics in the Gilded Age. Cherny's focus early in the book on the role of the political parties during the tim
Although America on the outside showed gilded signs of progress, the country was battling as political corruption, labor strikes, and southerner's who continued to cling to their old ways by refusing to comply with the federal government. Political parties mocked the myth that America was a classless/democratic society. The labor union disputes dispelled the myths that America was ideal of economic independence and that it was the land of boundless opportunity. Finally, all men were not equal or have basic citizenship rights, despite the fourteenth amendment. All the problems that America had was covered by a golden surface labeled as progression while its citizens suffered and battled. The fourteenth amendment centralized on establishing that the federal government was more powerful than the state government, something that American citizens were not going to accept. The amendment gave blacks citizenship, which then also gave them the right to vote. Legally it gave some rights to blacks, but in reality Americans were fearful of losing political power, especially in the southern states. According to
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Approximate Word count = 746
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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